[kde-linux] location of data files?

[John O'Hagan]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006 05:33 am, Paul Brannon wrote:
> I'm sorry to be asking this again, but could someone point me at the KDE
> website where info on where data for Mail (e-mails, filters, etc),
> Contacts, etc. are stored.  I'm trying to restore from a backup where I
> made an upgrade from Mandrake 10, wiped disk, and brought Mandriva 2006.
>
> On a side note, I can see my old e-mails, but when I try to open what
> apprears to be a good e-mail, the Subject changes to "No Subject", and the
> Sender, and rest of the data is "unknown".
[...]

I don't know where to point you on the KDE website, but on my Debian system 
the mails are in /home/$USERNAME/Mail, the filters and other settings are 
in /home/$USERNAME/.kde/share/config/kmail*, and contacts are 
in /home/$USERNAME/.kde/share/apps/kabc. Some other settings for Kmail and 
kaddressbook are scattered about in those ~/apps and ~/config folders.

I had the same problem that you describe with disappearing emails; turned out 
it was caused by file permissions changing during the backup process. 
Different backup methods have different effects on file permissions.

In that case, manually changing them back to be owned by your user should fix 
it. I think you can do that by changing the permissions on the whole ~/.kde 
folder and checking the "Apply to all subfolders..." box. (Right click 
"Properties" dialog.)

Something else that may be relevant; I recently discovered that the filenames 
used for KDE mails (they contain unusual characters) do not get copied onto 
FAT32 filesystems (the same for dotfiles unless they are set to be showing), 
so I ended up with no config files a bunch of empty mail folders until I 
realised what was happening and converted my backup disk to ext3.

Hope this helps,

John